Innocence — Penelope Fitzgerald

“A delectable comedy of manners” set in 1950s Florence, by the Man Booker Prize�"winning author of The Bookshop (The Boston Globe).
 
It's 1955, and Italy is still struggling a decade after the end of World War II. So are the Ridolfis, a Florentine family of long and fading noble lineage. Like their decrepit villa, they've seen better days. Only eighteen-year-old Chiara shows anything like vitality -- however impulsive and perilously naïve. Chiara has set her heart and her future on Salvatore Rossi, a brilliant, penniless young doctor and bull-headed son of a Communist, who has erased both politics and romance from his list of priorities.
 
With her plans stymied, Chiara calls on her resourceful and meddlesome British girlfriend, Barney, to help make an impossible match. Now, out of good intentions and the most innocent of instincts, two guileless friends are going to make a series of astonishingly wrong moves in the name of love.
 
From a winner of multiple major literary awards who was called “the best English novelist of her time” by Julian Barnes, Innocence is a novel “not just about Italians in love but of living and loving for all humans” (The Times).

“As intoxicating as a shot of aged brandy.” -- The Washington Post